Horror Psychology | Realms of Horror (Part 1)

I am currently in the summer lull following the first year of my PhD program and I have suddenly found myself with a lot more time on my hands, which means some time to work on this poor neglected blog. While this blog has not received the attention that I would have liked it to, I have no not stopped writing on horror. Very rarely do I post my academic writing about horror psychology on the site, as it can have too much jargon and often lacks the casual tone that I use here. However, I had a chance to write a slightly less formal paper this last semester and I thought that I would share it here, broken into 5 pieces for readability, as I feel it has a lot to say about the the realms of influence that horror psychology has on the world. (On an academic note you will find the cited sources listed at the end of the 5th part).

Scream by Alejandro Groenewold https://flic.kr/p/aDTLaY

 

Realms of Horror:The biological, psychological and social aspects of the horror experience

When I was  seventeen years old I went to see The Ring, a film about a cursed video tape in which the viewer has only seven days to live after watching it. The killer in the film is the ghost of a girl who comes out of a television and is completely unstoppable. This film experience sticks out in my mind because of three factors: First was the social nature of this particular horror experience, in which I was distinctly aware of not only myself, but of me as being part of a larger group, the reactions of my female friends sitting next me, the “audience commentary” that was being shouted while the film was in progress. I remember the cognitive dissonance I felt by the film’s climax, when everything I thought I knew was going to happen was flipped on its head, when the ghost was not soundly defeated. However, the part of this particular memory that stands out to me the most was what happened when I got home. When I arrived home everyone was asleep, and I returned to my room to discover the door closed and the sound of my TV having been left on. My apprehension to open the door was huge, all of the mental disruption and emotion suddenly returned. When I built up the courage to open the door and did so all I saw was a large black object leaping from the TV straight at me. Panic washed over my body and I can think of few other times where I have felt like I was experiencing the eminence of my own physical demise. The only thing going through my mind was “It was all real and now I am dead!”  While the reality of the situation was that my black cat had been trapped in my room most of the afternoon and had been sleeping on the TV and literally leapt at the chance to escape as soon as the door opened, my experience that night was a multifaceted event that took place in three realms, the social, psychological and physical, to add up to that evening’s climax of horror.

This story illustrates how the experience of horror is not merely physiological response or a psychological flash in the pan, but rather an experience that requires the interaction of psyche (both the mental and social aspects) and our physical bodies. It is important to note here that this paper, by in large, is dealing with the experience of horror as it is portrayed artistically, not as it is experienced in times of disaster, war, crime, etc.  This paper will explore the idea that horror is bio/psycho/social experience. I will explore how horror is accounted for in the current research as it is located in the body, the mind, and the social spheres. The paper will then illustrate how a synthesis of these ideas has been brought together by theorists outside the realm of psychology to explain horror in a much broader sense; I will then posit ways in which such a synthesis can be brought into psychology and perhaps even have valuable use as a therapeutic tool.

To be continued… coming up next the biological realm of horror…

 

Types of Horror | Everyday Horror

In interesting thing about human psychology is that we actually attend to very little of what is going on around us. The brain simply edits all of our perceptions on the fly. It takes what it finds to be important and filters out the rest. For the most part this keeps us alive and happy. There is a darker side to this though. One of the most intriguing things about studying horror is that you begin to see it everywhere, skulking about in every corner of our lives. Like a glamour we are blind to it either willfully or unwittingly. I am not talking about the horrors of war, violent crimes, or the general mill of human travesties. These things are terrible, and to a degree we pass over those too with a blind-eye. No, the horror I am talking about is what happens when come to some very strange realizations that things you thought were innocent or mundane are actually quite horrific.  Here are a couple to wet your whistle:

Oil

Oil Gusher-original by John Trost

You might wonder to yourself what is so horrific about oil. Keeping the environmentalism aspect out of it, I want you to stop and think. We live in a world where oil has made so many modern marvels possible. It gives us light, heats our houses, provided transportation, and it’s were all the plastic that makes up most of our gizmos and gadgets comes from. Oil is responsible for our way of life. But what you have not stopped to think about is the reality of oil’s original form. We live on a world built upon and powered by the dead!

Toy Story

How can there possibly be anything in this jolly movie about childhood that makes your mom cry when she sees it because it reminds her of her babies that are now grown-up (yeah this is my mom)? Never mind all the movies in the  series lack an adult-gaze that leaves you puzzled, if not disturbed. The everyday horror in this one is this scene right here.

Have you really ever stopped to think about what this meant for Sid? I mean yeah we root for the toys in the moment, but this kid just had his world-view rocked. If toys are now sentient, what else might be sentient? Think about the consequences that would occur from this. Here is a kid who obviously has some psychological issues, fire-starting, bullying, toy mutilation, consistent behavioral regulation problem (kicked-out of camp earlier this year) then you add on a paranoid belief that his toys are alive and are out to get him. This kid would get slapped with an early-onset schizophrenia disorder and wind up on anti-psychotics the rest of his life, for a belief, that in reality, is true. Does this fate sound familiar? To any self-respecting Lovecraft fan it should.

These are just a couple of every day horror moments. What are some every day horror moments that you can think of or experience?

Horror Psychology | Missing the Mark

I am currently neck-deep into my thesis on the psychology of horror and getting ready to start my doctoral program in Fall, hence the lack of posts of late. I try to keep tabs on the latest stuff coming out about the psychology of horror, which is not a lot, but I find myself ever disappointed by it. There are several things that seem to miss the mark of what horror does. Now I don’t know how many of the researchers are avid horror fans, and I seriously doubt that most of them consume as much horror in a year as I do in a week. However there seems to be a lack of critical thought with most of the current research, so I thought I would take the time to outline what is missing, as I feel that most of the current horror fans, myself included , feel alienated and even offended by what is inferred by some of this research. I will foot note my citation at the end of this for those that are interested.

I know I have ridden this pony since day one of this blog, but it is an important question, What is Horror?  I think it is one of the most important questions that needs to be answered. So important in fact my thesis, and very likely my dissertation are and will be spent answering this question. The reason this question is so important is that nearly all the research that is out there just assumes that there is a common understanding of what horror is and skip onto other things. Their reasoning is usually circular and goes something like “horror is what is depicted in horror film/stories/books/etc.” Slashers, thrillers, ghost stories, torture porn, demonic, and even occasionally sci-fi genre pieces are all lumped together as being the same things. Really? In none of the psychology of horror research that I have reviewed have researchers even bothered to define horror in their work.¹ Until this is defined we have a big problem. Most of the these studies are looking at why do people like horror films, and what makes horror fans tick, they don’t even bother to explore the emotion itself. They implicitly equate horror to various things such as, thrill/pleasure seeking, the ability to live out social roles (often called the cuddle theory of horror). Still other studies look at horror fans as lacking in empathy because of some particular physiological responses rate to violence or some other supposed mental or emotional deficit. These particular theories are often used to all but state that horror fans are closet sociopaths who get off on watching others pain, sex, (insert any other of human vice or suffering here), and while I am sure there are people out there, that does not describe me or any of the myriad of horror fans that I know. The research leaves an important question unasked: Why did you use horror and not some other genre. There are plenty of other genres that display wanton destruction, lust, and violence, why did you choose horror to investigate your questions of empathy, anxiety, psychopathy, etc? In the mountain of articles that I have read they never answer that. These authors do not seem to know what horror is or even have much experience with it,  at least they given no written indication of it anyway. For example, take a look at this article, The Lure of Horror, the author talks about why Stephen King’s novel It is frightening. The author states “…Perhaps clowns (e.g. as in Stephen King’s 1986 novel It) have the capacity to provoke fear because their make-up conceals their true facial emotions, thus thwarting our instinctual desire to read other people’s minds through their faces(it’s notable that many other horror baddies conceal their faces with masks)”. GIVE ME A BREAK! Anyone who has read the novel knows it has nothing to do with children’s proclivity toward coulrophobia. It rarely even appears as the Clown in the novel. And this is not just a one off, it happens multiple times in this article alone.  For another example you get explanations like the one provided by Marvin Zuckerman who is giving a discussion of stimuli habituation to media violence and thrill seeking, all under the banner of The Psychology of Horror Films, and yet not once has is it explained why horror is the target genre or address the kind of horror that I find the scariest, the quiet horror that never uses the violence and cheap thrills that is often stereotyped as horror.  Let me be clear it is not that I have a problem with definitions of horror including any of the aspects found in the above research papers, rather it is the assumptions made about what horror is without defining it as so. Psych research 101 is to define your constructs and give justification for your construct.

So what is horror then? Well my definition is ever evolving but I still think Lovecraft said it best, Fear of the Unknown. However I am not just talking about fear of what you can not see in the dark, although that is a part. It is the unknown that occurs when your most basic premises are violated and your ontological footing is crumbling beneath you; what you have always used to make meaning is life doesn’t work anymore. I am not saying I have hit on the universal definition of horror, nor that my definition wont change over time, but at least it is a position. I hope to raise the standard of work in horror psychology so that horror fans can find the thoughtful emotional-contemplation on the human condition and the strangeness and horror that surround us everyday in my research, rather than being seen as aberration of society and leaving them left horror struck. As horror fans or non-horror fans how do you feel about the way people think about your feelings of the genre? What do you think needs to spoken up about horror to those outside of it? Any other thoughts?

¹Tamborini, R., Stiff, J., & Heidel, C. (1990). Reacting to graphic horror: A model of empathy and emotional behavior. Communication Research, 17(5), 616.
Straube, T., Preissler, S., Lipka, J., Hewig, J., Mentzel, H.-J., & Miltner, W. H. R. (2010). Neural representation of anxiety and personality during exposure to anxiety-provoking and neutral scenes from scary movies. Human Brain Mapping, 31(1), 36–47.
Houran, J., Kumar, V. K., Thalbourne, M. A., & Lavertue, N. E. (2002). Haunted by somatic tendencies: Spirit infestation as psychogenic illness. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 5(2), 119-133.

Jarrett, C. (2011). The lure of horror. Psychologist, 24(11), 812–815.

Clasen, M. (2012). Monsters evolve: A biocultural approach to horror stories. Review of General Psychology, 16(2), 222–229.   
Just to name a few.

Lovecraft Quotes | The Genuine and Powerful

Lovecraft’s death anniversary was yesterday, but I was too busy with midterms to make a post. So here is my tribute to the Man of Providence

“The question to ask of art, including literature, is not whether it is healthy or pleasant, but whether it is genuine and powerful.” (emphasis added by author).

This one is a recently discovered quote from HPL, found on a postcard held in a private collection, directed as a criticism to one of the weird tales magazine editors. However I think it can give us something to talk about..

Horror I feel is probably one of the most genuine and powerful of all art genres, as it doesn’t pull the punches, and truly dives down to the deepest darkest parts of our psychology. Do you agree or disagree and why?